Piston, an Openstack-in-a-box vendor[1] are a sponsor of the Red Hat[2] Summit this year. Last week they briefly ceased to be for no publicly stated reason, although it's been sugggested that this was in response to Piston winning a contract that Red Hat was also bidding on. This situation didn't last for long - Red Hat's CTO tweeted that this was an error and that Red Hat would pay Piston's sponsorship fee for them.

To Red Hat's credit, having the CTO immediately and publicly accept responsibility and offer reparations seems like the best thing they could possibly do in the situation and demonstrates that there are members of senior management who clearly understand the importance of community collaboration to Red Hat's success. But that leaves open the question of how this happened in the first place.

Red Hat is big on collaboration. Workers get copies of the Red Hat Brand Book, an amazingly well-written description of how Red Hat depends on the wider community. New hire induction sessions stress the importance of open source and collaboration. Red Hat staff are at the heart of many vital free software projects. As far as fundamentally Getting It is concerned, Red Hat are a standard to aspire to.

Which is why something like this is somewhat unexpected. Someone in Red Hat made a deliberate choice to exclude Piston from the Summit. If the suggestion that this was because of commercial concerns is true, it's antithetical to the Red Hat Way. Piston are a contributor to upstream Openstack, just as Red Hat are. If Piston can do a better job of selling that code than Red Hat can, the lesson that Red Hat should take away is that they need to do a better job - not punish someone else for doing so.

However, it's not entirely without precedent. The most obvious example is the change to kernel packaging that happened during the RHEL 6 development cycle. Previous releases had included each individual modification that Red Hat made to the kernel as a separate patch. From RHEL 6 onward, all these patches are merged into one giant patch. This was intended to make it harder for vendors like Oracle to compete with RHEL by taking patches from upcoming RHEL point releases, backporting them to older ones and then selling that to Red Hat customers. It obviously also had the effect of hurting other distributions such as Debian who were shipping 2.6.32-based kernels - bugs that were fixed in RHEL had to be separately fixed in Debian, despite Red Hat continuing to benefit from the work Debian put into the stable 2.6.32 point releases.

It's almost three years since that argument erupted, and by and large the community seems to have accepted that the harm Oracle were doing to Red Hat (while giving almost nothing back in return) justified the change. The parallel argument in the Piston case might be that there's no reason for Red Hat to give advertising space to a company that's doing a better job of selling Red Hat's code than Red Hat are. But the two cases aren't really equal - Oracle are a massively larger vendor who take significantly more from the Linux community than they contribute back. Piston aren't.

Which brings us back to how this could have happened in the first place. The Red Hat company culture is supposed to prevent people from thinking that this kind of thing is acceptable, but in this case someone obviously did. Years of Red Hat already having strong standing in a range of open source communities may have engendered some degree of complacency and allowed some within the company to lose track of how important Red Hat's community interactions are in perpetuating that standing. This specific case may have been resolved without any further fallout, but it should really trigger an examination of whether the reality of the company culture still matches the theory. The alternative is that this kind of event becomes the norm rather than the exception, and it takes far less time to lose community goodwill than it takes to build it in the first place.

[1] And, in the spirit of full disclosure, a competitor to my current employer[2] Furthering the spirit of full disclosure, a former employer